Okay, you might be able to get over them using the incorrect spelling “Big Foot” in their golf ads (such as the one being carried in the Portland Press Herald). And the commercialization of the 1920s-coined word Sasquatch into Tiger Woods’ Nike club, the SasQuatch, well, is sort of clever, in a sporty kind of way.

But, come on. Who is writing the SasQuatch ad copy? Or why do sportswriters have to always make the same mistake about the unknown hairy hominoids that are the basis of the name, SasQuatch?

Take Angus Lind of the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Here he is penning a perfectly reasonable golf club article and he has to go and say something silly like this:

Nike has a club named the SasQuatch, and who’da thunk a club would be named after Bigfoot’s cousin — a hairy manlike creature no one’s ever seen. The face of the club is touted as having the “largest footprint in golf.” Go figure. But it works. It’s in Tiger’s bag — that says it all.

I know it’s been rough in the great city of New Orleans lately, and perhaps Lind can be excused because he’s off his game a bit, but, really, in the name of Bobby Jones, why write: “a hairy manlike creature no one’s ever seen”?

Sasquatch may be elusive, unverified, even legendary in the academic language of cryptozoology, but they are most assuredly not “unseen.” Exactly the opposite is true.

Sightings are a major evidential basis of the reality of Sasquatch, due to hundreds of years of Native Canadian and Native American encounters, for starters. Sasquatch/Bigfoot have been seen and even filmed, from Bluff Creek, California, to Nelson River, Manitoba, by Natives and now EuroNorthAmericans, literally hundreds of times in the last few hundred years. Darn, that’s why the name Nike has picked is so well-known and familiar-sounding.

Please, golfers. Use your SasQuatch clubs happily, but don’t think they are named after a “cousin” that “no one sees.” Sasquatch is merely another name for Bigfoot, and people are observing Sasquatch all the time, sometimes very closely! That’s part of what cryptozoology is all about, collecting and analyzing human beings’ sightings and searching for the as-yet-to-be-discovered new animals responsible for those close encounters. Yesterday’s cryptid is tomorrow’s mundane gorilla, giant panda, coelacanth, and okapi.

BTW, doesn’t the SasQuatch club’s Bigfoot that appears in some ads look a lot like the ING Sasquatch (below)?

About Loren ColemanLoren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013.

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6 Responses to “SasQuatch Sand Traps”

Loren, the Tampa Tribune (as you will recall) selected a fishing editor to comment on our Field Study last November. His article reflected a total lack of knowledge in cryptozoology.

Can you really expect another sports writer no-neck type to do any better on the subject?

At least we’ve had Swamp Ape sightings on a golf course here in Florida. But, that’s right, it was the greens superintendent that reported seeing it — not the golf pro.

Give the guy a little leeway on the “Big Foot” mispelling too. I just had to correct our college staff for the same error in my course description for the summer class! And capitalizing syllables seems to be a new trend in advertising so that they can attach nifty letter designations for their sku numbers on products. So, I guess “SQ” works for them.

I guess we should expect Titleist or Cobra to come up with a new product to compete with Nike’s offering. Want to bet it will be designated “BF”?

Well, before I jumped over to training programs so I could stay in Austin, I worked for six years in various newspaper jobs (education reporter, features writer, entertainment editor, managing editor, etc.), and while it does take a “special breed” to be a sport’s writer, reporters in general are not experts on any of the subjects they are writing on.
The “art” of journalism, if you will, is in coaxing your interview subject into explaining these complex, jargon-infused concepts in lay terms. However the art of good editing is in choosing the right reporter for a job. Too often cryptid reports get filed under “silly season” news and green, or less exacting writers, will be assigned to these. On the surface, the outdoors writer (the “fishing editor”) might be the person best suited to cover a search for cryptids (what is a search, after all, but a hunt without guns?), but then again, as you seem to be aware, the person the newsroom expects to be the best candidate to cover a story is not always so.
I remember when hominid reports were coming into the Portsmouth (Ohio) Daily Times (would have been around 1999) but the reporter chosen to cover it made a mockery of the story by quoting the subject in a way that seemed to poke fun at his accent and use of local dialect, instead of what he claimed to see.
Admittedly, some of his photos of “tree twist” looked like they could have been the work of thunderstorms or logging crews, and he was a bit exuberant, which put off some of the staff, but as a result of the ridicule this individual experienced post-publication, I was reluctant to try any sort of official follow up. Later, local researcher Todd Martin told me that the family of the man were indeed reluctant to talk to reporters now, but that, according to his sources, activity was ongoing in the Shawnee Forest, including reports of three toed tracks.